Apple, ranked the least green of the big tech companies earlier this year, is moving quietly to repair its reputation by switching its vast east coast data centre from coal to solar power.

Local officials in North Carolina say the company is preparing to build a solar farm adjacent to its $1bn data centre in Maiden.

The facility could help Apple recover from a Greenpeace report earlier this year which said its cloud-computing operations – run from centres such as the one in North Carolina – were heavily reliant on dirty energy such as coal.

The World Bank approved $297 million in loans to Morocco to support construction and operation of Morocco’s 500-megawatt (MW) Ouarzazate Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plant, one of several large scale solar power projects in various stages of planning or development across the solar energy rich Middle East-North Africa region.

Upon completion, the Ouarzazate parabolic trough CSP plant would be one of the largest CSP plants in the world. A group of seven international lenders has committed $1.435 billion dollars to build and develop the project. Ouarzazate is seen as a key milestone for Morocco’s national Solar Power Plan, which was launched in 2009 with the goal of deploying 2000 MW of solar power generation capacity by 2020.

Facebook’s state-of-the-art data center houses awesome amounts of computing power, but the biggest technical challenge has been the air handlers.

The company said today that its Prineville, Ore., data center received LEED gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. The power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating varies between 1.06 and 1.1, making it a data center that consumes about half what a building simply built to code would use.

A Dutch artist is aiming to create an artificial leaf in the Sahara Desert that can grow a layer of ice on its underside.

‘Sunglacier’, as the project has been dubbed, will feature a 200m2 surface covered in photovoltaic solar cells, which will power cooling condensers on the underside of the elm leaf-shaped structure to soak up humidity from the desert air and turn it into ice.

Ap Verheggen, the artist behind the project, hopes it will encourage people to believe that the impossible is possible when it comes to dealing with climate change.

The world’s largest social networking site recently announced plans to utilize more renewable energy to power it’s new Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters.

Last year, Facebook was scrutinized by its users for using coal to supply the energy for its massive data centers. The company responded by reminding the public that power for its newest data center would come from multiple sources, including renewables, and would be one of the most energy efficient in the world.

IBM is bringing electric power–in the form of solar panels–to data centers with trouble getting power in the first place.

The company tomorrow will detail a pilot project that couples solar power with water-cooled servers that run on high-voltage direct current. The method results in about a 10 percent energy savings by reducing the losses that normally happen in converting from alternating power from the grid to the direct current servers run on, according to Kota Murali, the chief scientist of nanotechnology at IBM India who developed the pilot as a side project.

That level of energy reduction is significant for large data centers with many servers, but the implications of solar and servers are potentially profound for places that don’t have access to reliable power, Murali said.

Facebook is building a ‘green’ datacentre in Sweden, the social networking giant’s first datacentre outside the US.

The company said on Thursday that it had picked the northern Swedish city of Lulea, just 100km south of the Arctic Circle, because of its access to renewable energy and the cold climate that is crucial for keeping the servers cool.

The centre will be the largest of its kind in Europe, and the northernmost of this magnitude on earth. It will handle all data processing from Europe, the Middle East and Africa and serve millions of the site’s 800m users. It will cover 30,000 sq m – about the size of 11 football pitches – and be fully packed with data servers.